Chapter 5 - Blood in the Water
Harper waited until nearly midnight, sitting rigid on the edge of her bed, rehearsing words that refused to arrange themselves into anything that sounded less terrifying than the truth actually was.
She heard the private elevator chime, then Dominic's footsteps in the hall — heavier than usual, unhurried in a way that told her something had already gone wrong before she'd said a word.
He appeared in her doorway with his tie loosened, a shadow of exhaustion under his eyes, and a look on his face that made her blood run cold.
"Sofia Marchetti," he said, without preamble. "She spoke to you today."
"How do you know that?"
"Because Sofia doesn't do anything without making sure it gets back to me." He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, a gesture that felt, suddenly, enormous. "What did she say to you, Harper?"
There was no version of tonight where Harper avoided the truth any longer. She stood, forcing herself to meet his eyes, and said the words she'd been carrying alone for six weeks.
"I'm pregnant, Dominic."
The silence that followed stretched long enough that Harper's pulse pounded in her ears. Dominic's expression didn't change — not immediately — but something behind his eyes shifted, some careful architecture cracking under sudden weight.
"How long have you known?"
"Six weeks."
"Six weeks." His voice was quiet, dangerously even. "And you said nothing."
"I was scared." The admission cost her something, saying it out loud. "I didn't know what it meant — for me, for the baby, for this whole arrangement. You told me from the very first night that this was business. I didn't know if a pregnancy made me more valuable to you or gave someone a reason to get rid of me."
Something raw flashed across his face — anger, she thought at first, until she recognized it as something closer to pain. "You thought I would hurt you."
"I thought your world might."
Dominic crossed the room in three strides and stopped in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. His hand came up, hesitant in a way she'd never seen from him, and settled against her stomach with a gentleness that undid something tightly wound in her chest.
"Listen to me carefully," he said, low and fierce. "Whatever this started as — whatever the contract said, whatever rules I laid out that first night — that ends now. You are not a liability, Harper. You are my wife, and that is my child, and I will burn this entire city down before I let Carmine Falco or Sofia Marchetti or anyone else lay a hand on either of you."
Harper's breath caught. "Dominic—"
"I should have told you sooner," he said, cutting her off, his thumb tracing an absent line at her waist. "I should have told you the night on that terrace that this stopped being business for me a long time before I kissed you. I was a coward about it. I let the rules protect me instead of telling you the truth."
"Which is?"
"That I love you." The words seemed to surprise even him, raw and unrehearsed in a way nothing about Dominic Russo ever was. "God help me, Harper, I love you, and I have no idea how to keep you safe in a world built to punish exactly this kind of weakness."
Harper reached up and pressed her palm against his jaw, feeling the tension coiled there, the fear he'd never allow anyone else to witness. "Then we figure it out together. No more rules. No more secrets."
"No more secrets," he agreed, and kissed her like a vow more binding than anything either of them had signed.
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But the danger Sofia had warned her about hadn't waited for Dominic's confession.
Three nights later, Harper's security detail reported a breach at the penthouse's underground garage — a service vehicle that shouldn't have had clearance, parked too long near the private elevator. Dominic's head of security pulled the footage and found two men in maintenance uniforms who'd never actually worked a shift in the building, gone before anyone thought to stop them.
"They were mapping the building," Dominic told Harper grimly, standing over a laptop with Elias and his chief of security in the penthouse's war room — a space Harper had never been permitted to enter before tonight. "Entry points. Elevator schedules. Guard rotations."
"Carmine?" Elias asked.
"Or Sofia's people, testing whether the rumor's true before they decide what to do about it." Dominic's jaw was tight, his eyes hard in a way Harper had only seen once before, on their wedding day, watching Carmine Falco across a crowded reception. "If they confirm Harper's pregnant with an heir the commission never sanctioned, this stops being a rumor. It becomes a target."
"What do we do?" Harper asked.
Dominic turned to her, and for the first time since she'd known him, she saw real fear behind his composure — not fear for himself, she realized, but fear for her, for the child she carried, fear of a kind that a man like Dominic Russo had never allowed himself before.
"We go to Carmine ourselves," he said finally. "Before Sofia gets there first with a version of this story designed to get you both killed. We control the narrative, or we lose control of everything."
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Outside, the city glittered on, indifferent as always, while inside the penthouse's fortified war room, Dominic Russo began planning the most dangerous negotiation of his life — one where the stakes weren't power, or money, or even his own survival, but the two people he'd only just realized he couldn't live without.
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